Philippines

Migration

There were two significant migration trends that affected
population figures in the 1970s and the 1980s. First was a
trend of migration from village to city, which put extra stress
on urban areas. As of the early 1980s, thirty cities had 100,000
or more residents, up from twenty-one in 1970. Metro Manila's
population was 5,924,563, up from 4,970,006 in 1975, marking an
annual growth rate of 3.6 percent. This figure was far above the
national average of 2.5 percent. Within Metro Manila, the city of
Manila itself was growing more slowly, at a rate of only 1.9
percent per annum, but two other cities within this complex,
Quezon City and Caloocan, were booming at rates of 4 percent and
3.5 percent, respectively.

A National Housing Authority report revealed that, in the
early 1980s, one out of four Metro Manila residents was a
squatter. This figure represented a 150 percent increase in a
decade in the number of people living in shantytown communities,
evidence of continuing, virtually uncontrolled, rural-urban
migration. The city of Manila had more than 500,000 inhabitants
and Quezon City had 371,000 inhabitants in such neighborhoods.
Moreover, rural-urban migrants, responding to better employment
opportunities in peripheral metropolitan cities such as Navotas,
had boosted the percentage of squatters in that city's total
population.

A second major migration pattern consisted of resettlement
from the more densely to the less densely populated regions. As a
result of a population-land ratio that declined from about one
cultivated hectare per agricultural worker in the 1950s to about
0.5 hectare by the early 1980s, thousands of Filipinos had
migrated to the agricultural frontier on Mindanao. According to
the 1980 census, six of the twelve fastest growing provinces were
in the western, northern, or southern Mindanao regions, and a
seventh was the frontier province of Palawan. Sulu, South
Cotabato, Misamis Oriental, Surigao del Norte, Agusan del Norte,
and Agusan del Sur provinces all had annual population growth
rates of 4 percent or more, a remarkable statistic given the
uncertain law-and-order situation on Mindanao. Among the fastestgrowing cities in the late 1970s were General Santos (10 percent
annual growth rate), Iligan (6.9), Cagayan de Oro (6.7), Cotabato
(5.7), Zamboanga (5.4), Butuan (5.4), and Dipolog (5.1)--all on
Mindanao.

By the early 1980s, the Mindanao frontier had ceased to offer
a safety valve for land-hungry settlers. Hitherto peaceful
provinces had become dangerous tinderboxes in which mounting
numbers of Philippine army troops and New People's Army
insurgents carried on a sporadic shooting war with each other and
with bandits, "lost commands," millenarian religious groups,
upland tribes, loggers, and Muslims
(see The Counterinsurgency Campaign
, ch. 5). Population pressures also created an added
obstacle to land reform. For years, there had been demands to
restructure land tenure so that landlords with large holdings
could be eliminated and peasants could become farm owners. In the
past, land reform had been opposed by landlords. In the 1990s
there simply was not enough land to enable a majority of the
rural inhabitants to become landowners. International migration
has offered better economic opportunities to a number of
Filipinos without, however, reaching the point where it would
relieve population pressure. Since the liberalization of United
States immigration laws in 1965, the number of people in the
United States having Filipino ancestry had grown substantially to
1,406,770 according to the 1990 United States census. In the
fiscal year ending September 30, 1990, the United States Embassy
in Manila issued 45,189 immigrant and 85,128 temporary visas, the
largest number up to that time.

In addition to permanent residents, in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, more than half a million temporary migrants went
abroad to work but maintained a Philippine residence. This number
included contract workers in the Middle East and domestic
servants in Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as nurses and
physicians who went to the United States for training and work
experience, a fair proportion of whom managed to become permanent
residents. The remittances sent back to the Philippines by
migrants have been a substantial source of foreign exchange.